BASIC VECTOR TUTORIAL.

This is my first vector tutorial made for Illustrator 10, I must clarify something, this tutorial was based in the spanish version of the software so please, excuse me if you find errors in the names of the tools, I'm showing you the aspect of each an every single one of the icons we are going to use during this tutorial, I hope that helps.

First we need this image.



Open the image in illustrator and mark smart guides in view/smart guides.

Double click on the base layer, a pop up will appear, make the layer transparent (or something similar) by 50%

Make another layer and name it "Outline".

Select the pen tool and remove the fill color, just leave the line color black, you can change it later.

Yes I played with the colors in PS before starting this, so I made the image blue in that way I could see the outline better.

Start drawing the outline with the pen tool; you need to click in the first point, then in the second and so on, if hold click and move the mouse in the second point you will create a curve, play with it, otherwise it will create a straight line.
Now, what happens if you find that you can't imitate a curve just like this example?, well there are 2 main points within a point they are the handlers (or something similar) when you finish your line alt+click on the handler (withouth clicking elsewhere!) and you can move the line a little bit more, release alt+click and continue with the other points.
To resume the linework you need to approach to the last point you made and the pen tool will change a little bit, it will be the pen and an kind of slash with the anchor legend on it, click on it and continue making the outline
You need to close the outline, approach to the first point you made, the pen tool will change again, now it will be a circle, that means that you are closing the outline.

If I hide the base layer the final result will look like this.


Now that we have the basics for the outlines we need start making new layers for the lights, the air ventilations, the windshield, the wipers and the wheels, you decide the amount of detail, if you want a simple vector just draw simple stuff, if you want a more complex vector then you should make more and more layers and lines, I'll go for a mid-complex design and remember, different layers are the key for success!!

After a while I ended up with this:



9 layers called, outline, lights, smalldotsleft, smalldotsright (both for the dots inside the lights), ventilation, windshield, wheels and wipers and a lot of small sub-layers.

Well, now the fun part, the coloring !!

Click in the outline, then select a color for the fill and for the line.

I chose D3E5EA for the fill and 1A6475 for the line, so now It looks like this:





Now, try to do that with the other elements in the piece, remember, you can hide layers (that's why we made them!!) and that will make your selection easier.

After a few clicks the car should look like this:



You can make elements with transparency, just click in the shape and in the transparency window window/transparency or shift+f10 and adjust the effect for the "glass", I'm not giving colors right now, experiment with colors in lines and in fills, is up to you :).

Well, now is the time to give this thing a little bit more of 3d feeling, I always try to have 3 main things in vectors (and in all my works), and those are the highlights, the base color and the shadows, for now, we are doing this for the body only its easy don't worry.

Hide all the layers except the one containing the photo of the murcielago and make 2 new layers, one called Highligts and other called shadows.

Start drawing the highligts shapes, make a mess no problem you only need to respect what is inside of the outline, to make things clear, do something like this:



5 shapes for the highlights

And 2 for the main shadows...

Now the tricky part, make the layer "outline" visible and select it, in the layer options (a triangle facing to the right near the top right corner of the layer window) select "Duplicate <whatever is called>" now you will have 2 outlines.
Make highlight visible, then select one of the outlines, drag and drop it into the highlight layer.
Click the shapes that exeded the outline limit, in my case there are only 2 shapes with that characteristic and also click on the outline that we just duplicated, its very important to select the new outline otherwise in the next step our work might look weird.
<----- the little blue squares mean that we have those shapes selected, click on the sublayers that have that square so now we have those sublayers marked in deep blue.
Call the pathfinder window (window/pathfinder, or shift+f9) and click in the first icon in the second row (divide) and a new sublayer in the layer window will appear..
The divide tool is really interesting, you see, the areas of the two shapes and the outline were in contact with each other, well, the divide tool divides each one of the selected shapes (it breaks the areas apart) in into new individual shapes inside a new sublayer called <group>
Now we need to get rid of those shapes that we don't need.

I recomend you guys to hide all layers and leave only the highlights layer visible, start hiding those new sublayers and delete the ones that doesn't affect the image.

In my case I only needed 2 of the sublayers that we got from dividing our shapes, so I had to erase 3 sublayers.
And the result after playing with new colors is:



As you might notice the body has some 3d feeling right now, but those shapes are grouped, if those shapes are the same characteristics you can leave them grouped, but if you want to change them individually you will have to right-click on one of them and select ungroup from the menu (I never leave my shapes grouped).

Do the same process for the shawdows and after a while the car should look like this:



Here you will face two choices: leave it like this or work a little bit more, I'll keep on working a little bit more.

Try to do the same for all the other elements in the piceRemember, details are the key to sucess.



With more work. a little bit of color changes and a new layer called "bg" I ended with this version, is basically the same but it now has shadows in the front air ventilation, wheels and wipers.

Keep experimenting with colors, its a nice thing to do :).


Well, I think this is the final result I wanted to achieve, the fills are gradients (that is up to you to find how to use them ;) ), shadows and lights everywhere, its fun and you need to play a lot with this.

After this, you can export it (file/export), select the file format and always check the option smooth lines (or something like that), select the resolution (in this case should be 72ppp) and you will have a 1024*768 image resolution, and place it as a wallpaper!! if you want it bigger then increase the ppp # (useful for prints).

You can use the advices you found here to try to do people portraits, draw new characters and lots of stuff, you only need to keep on experimenting, vectors require patience (to do and to learn), but I know you guys will end up doing masterpieces.

I hope you guys find this tutorial useful :).

If you have comments/questions about this tutorial send them to me at temoce@gmail.com
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